Let Them Eat Gourds!
Vote ME for Pumpkin Show Queen
We had a brief moment of autumn the other day. That got me reminiscing about pumpkins, and also about my uncle, who was not (as far as I could tell) a pumpkin. I dedicated my first book of short essays to him: “For Uncle Bob, because I sure didn’t get this from my parents.”
This is a look back at the last time I attended the Pumpkin Show with him.
If something family-friendly can be done with a pumpkin, it has been done at the Circleville Pumpkin Show. Circleville is a small town in central Ohio whose most notable feature is that it has long housed Hivelys, thereby disproving that the Midwest is entirely bland. It also puts on the annual Pumpkin Show, a harvest festival that focuses on, you guessed it, corn.
Just joshing! Corn is another Midwestern stereotype. The Circleville Pumpkin Show has focused on pumpkins, and only pumpkins, ever since the mayor started the festival in 1903.
The way I read it, all the area farmers back inna day were wagoning their harvest bounty to town, and the mayor wanted to appreciate their wives’ produce. So he set up displays and established a competition for the largest pumpkin grown by a lady. Ever a visionary, the mayor also held a competition for the largest pumpkin grown by regular guy farmers, thereby striving for gender equality a full century before we still don’t have it today.
Big pumpkins are the main attractions at the Show. The primary difference today is that the pumpkins are approximately the size of oxen, and they eat more, too. Otherwise, Pumpkin Show is precisely how I remember it from when I first visited it at age thirteen, except that now I know the meaning of the word “indigestion.”
Which is really too bad, because the festival carries on precisely how the mayor envisioned it more than a hundred years ago, with the world’s largest pumpkin pie, pumpkin waffles, pumpkin pizza, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin chili, pumpkin donuts, pumpkin pulled-pork sandwiches, pumpkin cappuccinos, pumpkin kettle corn, the face-painted Pumpkin Show Man navigating crowds on rollerblades, carnival games where you can win a Taylor Swift poster, and beauty pageant competitions for the Pumpkin Show queen.
The last time I visited Ohio in October, my uncle wanted me to have the full Pumpkin Show experience as an adult with access to antacids. He signed me up to sell pumpkin coffee and ride on a parade float alongside eight strangers and a roasted chicken. He took my picture under the “Most Unusual Pet” parade placard. But, despite wanting me to have the full Pumpkin Show experience, he did not enter me for the Miss Pumpkin Show competition.
So, in the spirit of still striving for gender equality, here is my at-large application for next year’s crown, answering the same questions asked of my competition.
Miss Pumpkin Show Application
Entrant:
Miss Zach Hively
Age:
A lady never tells!
Hobbies:
Doing family-friendly things to pumpkins, such as sawing them open with serrated knives, gutting them, and displaying their corpses to the neighborhood. I also enjoy consuming their flesh from tin cans.
Plans after high school:
Ride the bus home, eat a sandwich, probably take a nap.
Favorite Pumpkin Show memory:
There are so many wonderful memories to choose from! Like that time I would have won the pumpkin toss if I had forged my age to enter the kids’ twelve-and-under category. Or that time I sat on the announcement stage for a parade, and the man with the microphone kept insisting that my aunt “do the mayor when he comes by.”
But I have to go with the 1998 pet parade. My uncle loaned us the gerbil tank from the school where he works. Lo, the gerbil had that very morning given birth to half a dozen babies! My sisters, my cousin, and I dragged those gerbils in a wagon through downtown Circleville, and when we returned to the staging area, there was only the mama gerbil left. And boy, was she stuffed.
Somehow, we did not win the Most Unusual Pet category. As Pumpkin Show queen, I will institute a Greatest Attrition category for all future pet parades.
Favorite thing to do at the Pumpkin Show:
Once again, there are just so many choices. But I would have to say my favorite activity is eavesdropping.
Eavesdropping? What do you hear?
I can’t tell you! That would be rude. Besides, this year’s Baby Parade entrants really aren’t as ugly as people said.
What qualities do you have that you believe would make you successful as Miss Pumpkin Show, if chosen for the honor?
Diversity. I would be the first queen to break countless, possibly up to a dozen, glass hurdles. I’d be the first queen with an unplucked beard, and the first on this side of twenty. A real Jackie Robinson in the realm of Pumpkin Show queens.
How would you describe Pumpkin Show to someone who has never experienced it before?
Well, I described it already, so instead, I’d like to offer a new slogan suggestion.
The Circleville Pumpkin Show: Come for the pumpkins, stay for them too! And ladies, please keep your distance from the mayor.
This piece originally appeared in the Durango Telegraph way back in the day. It also ran recently in the Abiquiú News and it appears in my book, Call Me Zach Hively Because That Is My Name, which is the one I dedicated to Uncle Bob and which is full of shenanigans like this.
There is also, sadly, tragically, no official way to vote me for Pumpkin Show queen. But you can cast your vote of support for me by subscribing for free, or upgrading your subscription for bonus shenanigans.
Happy fall, everybody!
This had me snort laughing in the doctor’s office: there was only the mama gerbil left. And boy, was she stuffed. 🤣🤣🤣
They weigh cabbages at the Alaska State Fair for largest cabbage. My cousin felt bad for runners up, etc. and institutes Cabbage Fairies to vote for sincere, etc., cabbages. But the Corn, the poor corn. The largest corn festival is in Eden, NY. There is a corn queen, but I see nothing about a corn king or even a colonel.